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Our projected bracket

Will we see Endicott in the field?Endicott photo by David Le Photography

So this is what happens when nobody loses. The team with the best at-large chance that lost in Week 11 was Louisiana College. (Talk about a loss that barely made a ripple on a busy day.) So in the end, we ended up with the same six Pool C teams that it looked like it would be before the weekend started.

But we still went through all of the steps anyway, just to make sure.

Wesley was our Pool B team. Although they had a regional loss, it doesn’t seem right to make national decisions without the secondary criteria. For more about the selection criteria, check our FAQ. So both teams are 9-1 at that point, Wesley has a much better strength of schedule and a win against a regionally ranked team … whereas Case Western Reserve didn’t even play any.

Pool C went like this for us: Redlands, Illinois Wesleyan, Case Western Reserve, McMurry, Centre and Endicott last. Here’s a shorthand look at their resumes:

The remaining 1-loss team, Illinois College, has a .497 strength of schedule. Then there are many 2-loss teams. We think many of them are better than Endicott, however, the NCAA never ever ever sees it this way. If Wheaton or St. John Fisher were to make the field, we’d be surprised, but it would be a better field.

Enough with the explanation. Here’s our bracket. It’s a PDF download, so if you can’t see the PDF on that page, there’s a link to download it for yourself.

That gives us our 32 teams. From that we take picked four top seeds, and we took UW-Whitewater, Mount Union, Mary Hardin-Baylor and St. Thomas. Remember one of the new criteria the NCAA football committee can use as a tiebreaker among unbeaten teams is performance in last year’s playoffs. With that, UW-Whitewater and Mount Union no longer have to worry about their top seeds, but also, it can be used as a tiebreaker for top seeds.

Once again, geography may hurt UMHB. Why should the #1 seed (#4 in both polls) play the 16th ranked Trinity (3rd in Regional Rankings) while Johns Hopkins gets to play Hampden-Sydney (8-2, ranked 25th, last week, and 6th in the Regional Rankings)? If you are going to fly McMurry to Linfield, fly a lower seed to UMHB.

It doesn’t matter what region they live in, but where on the map they are. It makes more sense for them to be in this group. With Albion a short trip from Mount Union and clearly bottom seed-worthy, they moved into this group and someone had to move out. In this case, it was the southernmost team.

With Monmouth having a better In-Region record, how is it that Dubuque gets the higher seed? Both are 9-1, I thought that in-region games were the tie breaker. Monmouth also has a better SOS. Just curious.

RT @Kimo3Thorpe: @d3football whats the odds trinity(tx) gets a home bid vs McMurry. How do they make that choice vs playing umhb at umhb?

The problem is that there are three west coast teams and three Texas teams likely to make the field. The NCAA will not pay for two flight if it can only pay for one, and that means that someone from Texas has to fly to the isolated west coast team. (Or, if seedings suggested it were proper, the west coast team could fly to Texas, but in this case, Linfield is undefeated.) The lowest-seeded Texas team is McMurry, so that dictates they should play the best team possible given those travel restrictions.

So we project McMurry flies to Linfield. The remaining west coast teams play each other and the remaining Texas teams play each other.

I read Pat’s article about two loss teams not applying and agree with the assesment that the system should be tweaked to reward teams that play “tougher” opponents during the year. In an effort to “objectify” the efforts of the one and two loss teams, I put all 30 of them into an Access database. Then I took 5 easily obtained bits of information that are out there for the committee to look at. Specifically, SOS ranking 1 to 239, D3Football’s top 25 all the way out to the teams getting no votes at number 47, the AFCA D3 poll as well out to their no vote getters at 44, the total offense ranking of the NCAA and lastly the total defense ranking of the NCAA. Then I added the 5 numbers together and divided by 5. Following are the results:

So Wesley becomes the Pool B selection and the top 6 remaining teams get in. Wouldn’t that ne nice? As you can see, this process does match half of what D3Football predicts will happen – so it’s not altogether out in left field.

Here’s the next dozen just so you can see if your team was in the hunt or not:

I would like to see some effort by someone somewhere that has the clout to share with the selection committee some of the inequalities that many of us see in how teams get selected into the playoffs. I would rather see something a little more objective to point to in the selecting of the teams. I’m not advocating that we use mine exclusively or anything like that, but something really needs to be done to get the better teams into the playoffs.